Purpose of this document
-Linux is a freely-distributable implementation of Unix for
-inexpensive personal machines (it was developed on 386s, and now
-supports 486, 586, Pentium, PowerPC, Sun Sparc and DEC Alpha
-hardware). It supports a wide range of software, including X
-Windows, Emacs, TCP/IP networking (including SLIP), and many
-applications.
+Linux is a freely-distributable implementation of Unix for inexpensive
+personal machines (it was developed on 386s, and now supports 486, 586,
+Pentium, PowerPC, Sun Sparc, ARM and DEC Alpha hardware, and even the IBM
+System 390 mainframe!). It supports a wide range of software, including X
+Windows, Emacs, TCP/IP networking (including SLIP), and many applications.
This document assumes that you have heard of and know about Linux,
and now want to get it running. It focuses on the Intel
@@ -133,16 +132,14 @@ reliability or performance requirements, these integrators provide
a valuable service by making sure you won't get hardware that's
flaky or dies two days out of the box.
-There are several firms of this kind (and I'll list them here as I
-learn more about them). The only such outfit I know about
-personally is . These good people build
-high-end, high quality Linux workstations with a nifty
-Tux-the-penguin logo on the front. They have intimate ties to the
-Linux community (the lives on a machine in their back
-room, Linus owns one of their boxes, and they even throw resources
-at your humble HOWTO maintainer occasionally).
+There are several firms of this kind (and I'll list them here as I learn
+more about them). The only such outfit I know about personally is ; in 1998 I became a
+mrmber of VA's Board of Directors. VA builds high-end, high quality Linux
+workstations with a nifty Tux-the-penguin logo on the front. They have
+intimate ties to the Linux community; SourceForge, the GNU site, and the
+Debian project all live on a machine in their back room, and Linus's
+personal machine is one of their boxes.
For those of us without a champagne budget, the rest of this
HOWTO is about how to install Linux yourself.
@@ -584,7 +581,7 @@ Even if they are not directly applicable to your system, they will
help you understand the issues involved.
. With FIPS, a
-disk optimizer (such as Norton Speed Disk), and a little bit of
-luck, you should be able to resize MS-DOS partitions without
-destroying the data on them. It's still suggested that you make a
-full backup before attempting this.
+Under Linux allows you to create, destroy, resize and copy partitions. It
+supports ext2, FAT16, and FAT32 filesystems, Linux swap devices; it also
+knows about MS-DOS disk labels. Parted is useful for creating space for new
+operating systems, reorganising disk usage, copying data between hard
+disks, and disk imaging. It is relatively new code, but is reported to
+work well and not trash data.
-If you're not using FIPS, however, the classic way to modify
-partitions is with the program FDISK. For example, let's say
-that you have an 80 meg hard drive, dedicated to MS-DOS. You'd like
-to split it in half---40 megs for MS-DOS and 40 megs for Linux. In
-order to do this, you run FDISK under MS-DOS, delete the 80
-meg MS-DOS partition, and re-create a 40 meg MS-DOS partition in
-its place. You can then format the new partition and reinstall your
-MS-DOS software from backups. 40 megabytes of the drive is left
-empty. Later, you create Linux partitions on the unused portion of
-the drive.
+There is a non-destructive disk repartitioner available for MS-DOS, called
+FIPS. Look at . With FIPS, a disk
+optimizer (such as Norton Speed Disk), and a little bit of luck, you should
+be able to resize MS-DOS partitions without destroying the data on them.
+
+The older method of resizing a partition, if you don't have one of these
+resizing partition editors available, is to delete the partition(s), and
+re-create them with smaller sizes. If you use this method, you absolutely
+must make a backup in order to save any of your data.
+
+The classic way to modify partitions is with the program FDISK. For
+example, let's say that you have an 80 meg hard drive, dedicated to
+MS-DOS. You'd like to split it in half---40 megs for MS-DOS and 40 megs for
+Linux. In order to do this, you run FDISK under MS-DOS, delete the 80 meg
+MS-DOS partition, and re-create a 40 meg MS-DOS partition in its place. You
+can then format the new partition and reinstall your MS-DOS software from
+backups. 40 megabytes of the drive is left empty. Later, you create Linux
+partitions on the unused portion of the drive.
In short, you should do the following to resize MS-DOS partitions
with FDISK:
@@ -797,12 +805,6 @@ But in today's regime of very cheap, very large hard disks these
complications seem less and less necessary for your first Linux
installation. For your first time, especially, keep it simple.
-Under Linux, several tools are available to edit partitions. One probably
-worth checking out is . The documentation says it can resize partitions
-without destroying the data on them, but proceed with care and make
-backups anyway.
-
Booting the installation disk
The first step is to boot the bootdisk you generated. Normally
@@ -1408,12 +1410,8 @@ David Shao <dshao@best.com>.
The following sets edit modes for GNU EMACS
Local Variables:
fill-column:75
+compile-command: "mail -s \"HOWTO update\" ldp-submit@lists.linuxdoc.org
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